Mon, 2005-01-31 16:28

Rather than shovel links into a blogroll, I’m trying to also post reviews of the sites I link to. Here’s my take on www.AbbyWinters.com, one of my favorite websites.

For better or worse I’ve enjoyed sexual imagery for as long as I can remember. On the other hand I don’t have a lot of patience with conventional pornography. (Actually does anybody admit they do? I don’t think I’ve ever run into anyone who claims they like photos of overinflated boobs, tattooed eyelids, grossly outstretched tongues, and especially high heeled shoes in bedbut somebody’s got to be paying for it because the internet’s awash in those kinds of images. But I digress…)

I really like Abby Winter’s website, www.abbywinters.com because she doesn’t like that stuff either. (She’s sworn never to photograph anyone wearing high-heels in bed.)

Instead Abby photographs ordinary, healthy, attractive, naked women (roughly college age, generally Australian) doing familiar things in familiar settings. She has a studio but more often she photographs her models in their own homes.

She’s an excellent photographer with a background in theater lighting. That’s reflected in the quality of her pictures. She’s also enjoys pornography herself. That’s reflected in the style of her pictures.

Abby posts one to two sets of very large, high-definition photos daily. Her prices are very reasonable, her customers polite (on the associated forums), her website is well designed, and her staff is personable. Subscribe for three months in a row (or pay for three months all at once) to gain access to the "Gold" section.

The videos on the site (she doesn’t shoot them herself) range from giggly/shy jumping on the bed to very intimate leave-the-camera-running masturbation and sex. I’m not a particular fan of videos. I like Abby’s because they tend to make the model’s personality available. It’s a pretty nice bonus for those of us who prefer woman-next-door sorts of erotica.

I also like Abby because she’s pretty outspoken about what she thinks, what she does and doesn’t like, what she does and doesn’t do, and best of all why.

Great line in the forums from one of Abby’s early staffers:

You mentioned that there has to be "human sexual energy". I don’t think I’ve ever been turned on while at a shoot (ok…maybe Petra…), and even if there was that energy or tension, the model would most certainly freak out – she feels completely vulnerable in the situation. We leave the "energy" up to them!!

Great line from "Video Dude," evidently the only man on Abby’s staff (the photo in question shows a panty-clad woman’s legs and behind as she leans out a window to pick up (I think) her cat:

I’ve been busy making this wallpaper today, which I thought would be very amusing to have on one’s desktop.

But Abby wondered if some may consider it as inappropriate. The argument being it’s out of context from the shoot; and it centers around a single bodypart and not the model as a person; and it’s a sexually oriented bodypart, as opposed to e.g. an eye or a belly button.

My argument is, it’s funny, and cute, and relatively harmless. Certainly it’s not anything explicit or gratuitous (depending on your definition of ‘gratuitous’).

What do you think? Please tell us your own views, as well as what you think others may infer from it.

Great line from Abby:

Although it may not be PC to say it, the less turned on I am, the better the pics will turn out, cos I will focus on capturing good images of a gorgeous model, not sating my own needs by using the telephoto lens to zoom in and see what she had for breakfast.

I still haven’t figured out which way I want to go with this weblog. I especially haven’t mastered responsible filtering technology like NannyNet and ICRA. Until I do I won’t post any pictures on this site and so I won’t post samples of her work either. You can visit the guest section of her website, though, and see for yourself.

It’s a great website.

Full disclosure: I’ve occasionally exchanged email with Abby and I’ve contributed — sometimes heavily though not lately — to the forums on her site (under the name Talking Figleaf.) Although she has in the past waived my subscription fees I’m currently a paid subscriber. One of these days I might join her affiliation program, which would generate a little revenue to help support this site, but, at the moment anyway, I’m not going to get compensation if you click through to her site from here.

Update: Well that’s weird. This site hasn’t been online more than three weeks and Google’s already indexing it! Based on search strings in my log files it looks like a lot of you looking for Abby and finding me. If so then sorry for the detour — you probably want to go here instead.

Update: This was one of my earliest posts on this site and I wrote it in a hurry. I keep coming back to tweak it because while it says what I wanted to say I don’t think it says it particularly well. If anyone ever links and/or trackbacks to this page I’ll observer proper blog etiquette and quit fiddling with it.

Sun, 2005-01-30 09:43

Via Clive Thompson here’s an ought-to-be-more-widely-known tidbit about abstinence-only education programs, specifically about abstinence-pledge programs.

Two key items – Celibacy pledges are effective only as long as celibacy is seen as a sign of non-conformity. Celibacy loses its appeal once it becomes a majority practice.

Speaking as a prudish libertine, I suppose overall it’s better for individual youngsters to consider themselves predominantly celibate with occasional slip-ups than to think of them as promiscuous with extended "dry" periods. Considering the track record of most school-age kids it’s probably also more realistic.

A celibacy bias makes them less likely to "stray" for totally trivial reasons (e.g. peer pressure, ennui, a sense that they’re not "getting enough.") A celibacy bias probably ought to make them better appreciate, and ideally enjoy, the occasions when they do have sex.

Or, to put it even more bluntly, if a youth is going to have sex I suspect it’s healthier that he or she regard it as something like literally "getting lucky" than for them to think something like "well it’s about time" or "finally, I’m no longer a loser."

But! There’s the matter of the second key item: – When celibacy-pledges break their pledges, they’re far less likely to use birth control or worry about communicable diseases.

I suspect there are three reasons for this:
1) Abstinence-only education may use threats of STDs and pregnancy as a deterrent, but if they do then by definition they can not also provide education for circumventing those deterrents. Thus kids who finally fumble each other off the pledge are likely to be particularly in the dark about the details.

2) Those that swallow the abstinence-only message but have sex anyway are more likely to have those uneasy "condoms make it a calculated act instead of true love" problems that traditionally lead to so many teen pregnancies and deep-seated untreated VD infections.

3) Those who have hopped on, and then fallen off, the abstinence bandwagon may adopt a "better sheep than lamb" attitude where if they’re going to "fuck up" by having sex in the first place then what does it matter if they really fuck up?

That’s all speculation though. Here’s the quote:

Taking the pledge greatly delayed whether a teenager actually had sex, to the extent that a non-pledging teenager was as likely to have sex with his/her first dating partner as a pledge-taking teenager who was on his/her fourth dating partner. The problem, the scientists discovered, is that the pledge only worked if the pledge-takers comprised a minority of the high school population. That’s because the pledge was regarded as a badge of nonconformist pride. Ironically, if too many people in the school actually take the pledge, it doesn’t work any more. Worse, when pledge-takers eventually did have sex, they were far less likely than non-pledge-takers to use birth control and to guard against STDs.

Link: Collision Detection

Link: In PDF format the paper on abstention rates and conformity in pledge-program schools.

Bottom line: I like the approach most sex education courses take — that abstinence is preferred until you’re ready, that you’re probably not ready as soon as you think you are, and in any case here’s what to do whenever you get there.

figleaf

Wed, 2005-01-26 16:09

[Via www.SexBlo.gs’s Carol L. Thanks!]

Caitlin Hall tackles the question of whether pornography objectifies women. She titles her piece "Porn does anything but objectify women." I think this may overstate her case. She reasonably argues that porn objectifies sexual acts rather than the individuals in them. She also points out that the men in porn are no less anonymous and emotionless than the women. This doesn’t really substantiate her assertion that porn does not objectify the models or actors therein.

I’ve always taken exception to the assertion that "erotica" and "pornography" represent different ends of a continuum. I’ll get deeper into this another day, but suffice to say that I tend to put erotica in the broader, and wider, field of literary or artistic expression, while putting porn on a continuum with advertising.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t inherently object to advertising but its purpose is more expressly to create desire and/or dissatisfaction with the status quo. It tends to be oriented towards an individual decision maker. It also, in most forms, tends to objectify its models and/or actors to the same degree that pornography does. To that extent at least, and to the extent that women appear in porn, then one can argue that women are in fact objectified in porn. (Actually a more accurate early-20th-Century term might be "alienated" rather than objectified but here in the 21st Century that’s quibbling.)

Hall suggests complaints about objectification of women relates more to the tendency for (visual) porn to be heavily oriented towards male satisfaction, often to the exclusion of women’s satisfaction:

Maybe the problem is that pornography is unquestionably targeted toward men – the woman’s pleasure is always incidental, the man’s always instrumental. Admittedly, a large proportion of porn involves sex acts that are only physically gratifying to the man involved. But that’s not really so surprising – it’s a case of art imitating life. Because the people who consume porn are overwhelmingly male, the object of most such films is male orgasm – on- and off-screen.

Link: University of Arizona Daily Wildcat editorialist Caitlin Hall

This cartoon from Gloria Brame’s blog illustrates this point rather well. Current porn really does offer little in the way of satisfaction for many women.

[cached version]

... although a similar (if less visually effective) illustration might show a woman engrossed in a romance novel while her partner rolls his eyes at similarly objectified acts of controlled male initiative designed to trigger equally symbolic touchpoints in women.

But I digress.

Hall concludes with a correct assertion that women are equally degraded by an (ironically) paternalistic attitude that they’re incapable of voluntarily appearing in porn.

Women (and men) who insist that pornography dehumanizes women to the point that it is quite literally impossible to make an informed decision to appear in it do far more than pornographers to dehumanize women. As McElroy points out, they would have women be reduced to the status of children, in which free choice, absent coercion, is no longer sufficient – in fact, in which "free" choice is quite literally impossible.

It’s hard to believe that anything could be more dehumanizing than that.

I’m inclined to meet her about 90% of the way and say that to the extent that women now have the social and legal rights to own and express their sexuality it is perfectly legitimate for them to do so in ways that might cause feminists of previous generations to blanch. This applies to a striking majority of women in North America, Western Europe, and elsewhere. To the extent that these women haven’t always had those rights, and to the extent that some still do, then traditional difference feminists still have a point. A much diminished one, true, but still a point.

I happen to believe that to the efforts of early feminism continue bear fruit — to the extent that now-dowdy/cranky types like Andrea Dworkin and Catherine McKinnon kicked up a fuss about the treatment of women as objects into the late 20th Century continues to reverberate — women will more and more be able to enter and later exit the sex industry as they see fit, with consequences no greater or less than those encountered comparable non-sexually freighted industries such as advertising, telemarketing, hospitality, and entry-level retail.

Come to think of it, that’s my 2 cent reply to Week Two of the Sexy Saturday Question series. [Update: Sexy Saturday Questions has gone dark. —fl]

Sun, 2005-01-23 22:31

I ran across this interesting insight while browsing Cat’s old blog.

I decided to not link to one particular blog that I read on occasion, mostly because every time I read him, I become furiously angry at his lack of communication skills. He is married, with a wife and kids. He’s not getting any and is getting more and more frustrated. However, he REFUSES to talk to his wife about this problem and just rants – getting more and more angry with each post.

His last post just about did me in – he is convinced that a book he has read will solve the problem…a book that sounds frighteningly like a Promise-Keepers crap (you know, "it’s god’s will that the man is here and the woman is there and that’s the way life was meant to be" blah blah blah)...he has decided that his wife wants him to be more of a Dom and take control (of her).

Many problems with this in my opinion…one, he hasn’t actually TALKED to his wife about this so he actually has NO fucking clue as to what she wants! Another major problem is that he wants to be a Dom…well, he seems to just want his wife to be more submissive (not quite the same thing).

Sadly, I don’t think he sees the difference. If he’s too cowardly to TALK to his wife, then he won’t be an effective Dom; and, if he too blind to see that a D/s relationship is VERY different then the "man" simply "being more manly", then he won’t make a very responsible Dom.

link: Cat Nasty (scroll down to entry from April 6th. FYI: Cat now blogs at Pussy Tales)

Cat was probably referring to the author of the now largely lapsed Suburban Sex Blog who seems to have absorbed the message. One of his last, he says

I guess this blog sucks now that I’m getting laid again and things are good with Nicky and I. ... It’s been fun too, not the same old sex that we used to have. I credit your comments and this blog to it all. I needed to change my thinking, and together, we did it.

link: Suburban Sex Blog, Nov. 1, 2004

I think that’s about right. Communication helps.

Not that doing something about it is as easy as saying you should, especially if you’ve been quiet with each other about sex so long enough it’s become a habit.

On the other hand, if you’ve been sitting around wishing instead of doing then you’ve got the time to introduce the matter slowly. Or to bring it up rashly (though not angrily) on the assumption that since silence isn’t working anyway, expressing your wishes probably won’t make things worse.

I should repeat that one thing you can’t do is unilaterally vent — almost everyone I’ve spoken to on the "up-hill" end of the frustration circuit also wishes things were different, and as long as they don’t see you as contemptibly unfair, resentful, or unreasonable they’re probably willing to try and work something out. Popping your cork in the face of possible sympathy risks a one-way trip into contemptability.

I’ll have more to say about this later. For now I’m just saying it’s worked for me.

Sun, 2005-01-23 07:40

This entry is about topless beaches, Megan’s Law in California, and a Ventura Co. public defender named Liana Johnsson. But first a major digression:

A few years ago some friends and family members found ourselves perched on an unbelievable rocky beach near the roadside on a gigantic (miles wide) and almost completely deserted clear-water lake in Western Canada. Almost everybody on the beach (mostly women and kids with a scattering of dads) was naked — virtually all beaches in Canada are considered "clothing optional."

A couple of Winnebagos full of conservative-looking middle-age men in classic white golf shirts and sunglasses and their late-adolescent sons pulled off to the side of the road. They spotted us, started making a racket, and began making their way down to the beach I was thinking at best they’re oglers and at worst it’s going to be trouble.

No such thing. They all quietly headed over to the relatively empty side of the beach, shucked their own clothes, swam around for a while, got out, toweled off, hopped back in their ‘Bagos, and headed on down the road.

Now that’s grown-up behavior. I’m sure they enjoyed seeing naked women on the beach but that’s neither why they stopped nor why they stayed. Pretty decent people in a pretty decent place. (Where "decent" means doing the right thing, not trying to make others do the "right" thing.)

Now where was I? Oh yeah, It turns out that in California women convicted for topless sunbathing (indecent exposure) must register as sex offenders under Megan’s law.

A group of lawyers, at Johnsson’s request, has asked the Legislature to make topless sunbathing legal, saying the ban is the last criminal sanction that treats women differently than men.

The new movement has urgency: Because of a December court ruling, Johnsson and other attorneys contend, women convicted of indecent exposure could find themselves listed as sex offenders under Megan’s Law, alongside rapists and child molesters.

"At some point, men’s breasts became liberated and women’s didn’t," Johnsson said Friday. "This is the only thing left that men are legally allowed to do and, for women, they have to register as a sex offender. The real issue is there should be equal protection under the law."

link: sexxblog

I ought to mention this isn’t a particularly urgent issue:

For its part, the state attorney general’s office said Megan’s Law would apply only if the woman has "lewd intent" — and topless sunbathing is not normally considered lewd. In addition, they said, a misdemeanor conviction for indecent exposure requires only registration under Megan’s Law, not public disclosure on the new government websites.

But neither is the status quo entirely benign:

In an Orange County case last month, a state Court of Appeal ruled that anyone convicted of misdemeanor indecent exposure must be listed as a sex offender under Megan’s Law. The databank recently was placed on the Internet, so people can search it for sex offenders.

The court said including indecent exposure offenders is not cruel and unusual
punishment because Megan’s Law is not technically a "punishment" but simply a regulatory tool. Lawyers in the case said trial judges and prosecutors should have the discretion to decide, but the court took that away.

"Can you imagine the burden on police to now have to track all these people?" asked Carol E. Lavacot, the Orange County public defender who challenged the ruling in the 4th Appellate District. "It’s a way overboard decision."

Other public officials such as parks and recreation officers, legislators, and the Governor’s office point out that citations for public nudity are very rare, that the law distinguishes (appropriately, I think) between "indecent" and "lewd" behavior, and that park rangers are too busy with more important problems to chase down topless sunbathers. But the law as interpreted by the appeals court is the law.

At the risk of irritating possible readers I’m not opposed to Megan’s Law-type legislation but I firmly believe there’s a difference between due diligence and "I’ll have to confiscate that picture of a pocket knife, son" zero tolerance enforcement. The law ought to be clarified and, if necessary, changed.

Finally, of course, there a number of bluenoses oppose any changes.

Randy Thomasson, president of Campaign for Children and Families, called it a "loopy idea" at a time when California needs to strengthen laws against public nudity.

"We already have too many sexual assaults in society. This will fuel that fire, and if the women don’t understand, that’s because they don’t think like a man," Thomasson said.

Maybe they just don’t think like Campaign for Children and Families members.

But [Liana] Johnsson countered the notion that "if you allow topless sunbathing on state beaches … civilization will collapse. I tried to show that we have faced these same fears, like when we gave women the right to vote and enter the armed forces, and we have survived."

I was pleased to discover on that beach in Canada, public toplessness, even casual nudity, isn’t public menace neither to those who are topless nor to random passers by.

Sat, 2005-01-22 00:39

Note #3: Birth Control: Vasectomies are surprisingly reversible. According to the urologist who reversed mine, the biggest obstacle isn’t reconnecting the plumbing. It’s the typical age of the reverse-ee and of the reverse-ee’s partner. The standard scenario: Man gets vasectomy in his mid-30’s. Man remarries in his early-to-mid-50’s. Man’s partner is in her early-to-mid-40’s. They wish to start a second family. Fertility at these ages is already moderately problematic anyway, and this, more than the technical surgery itself, accounts for most reports of low success rates for reversals.

Bottom line: If this is why you’re balking at a vasectomy, discuss it with a urologist.

Sat, 2005-01-22 00:35

Affairs: Never have an affair unless you’re so comfortably confidently happy with your partner that you don’t need to have one. (Think of it as a correlary of Murphy’s "Never go to bed with anyone crazier than you are.")

Thu, 2005-01-20 08:49

Cock-sucker: The term has many unfortunate uses and connotations, which is a shame since very very few of the connotations have anything to do with actually sucking cock. Let’s go one step further. Just as boys in the lockeroom stop bragging about sex as soon as they actually begin having it, it’s hard to use cock-sucker as an epithet once you’ve met someone who knows how to do it.